The Curse and Modern-Day Colonizers
The Curse follows a reality TV show couple as they upcycle houses and make them more environmentally friendly, raising the property value in the process. While this pushes the lower income residents out of their neighborhoods, they justify the business venture by ensuring that the residents they’re displacing don’t end up with higher rent. A recently displaced resident moves to a more expensive home, but fear not, as Whitney and Asher subsidize the rent so that the resident’s rent stays the same. This previous resident’s reaction to this news is filmed for all of America to see, with the producers hoping to get a grateful reaction to what they deem as a fair trade.
Asher and the curse
Dougie tells Asher to go give a little girl some money for the cameras. Asher obliges, but he only has a hundred dollar bill. Asher gives it to her for the camera but then tells her that he’ll get her change of twenty dollars because he needs the hundred dollar bill. Her and her sister refuse, and he snatches it off of her. This prompts the little girls to say ‘I curse you’. He goes to get the change but the machine doesn’t work so they never end up getting any money. When he goes home he finds that the chicken penne he ordered has no chicken in it.
He tells Whitney what the little girl said to him and Whitney tells him to go find her. This is pretty weird, but Asher is a cuck both literally and figuratively, so he goes to find her. He doesn’t find her, instead giving the hundred dollars to a different homeless woman with a baby, and goes home.
One day Asher is going into one of the empty properties that he owns and finds that the girl that cursed him is squatting there with her family. Asher decides to let them stay there for free, ensuring that all of the issues with the house are fixed. During this process, he has some conversations with the girls. He asks about the curse she put on him and she tells him that it was a TitTok trend where you give someone a tiny curse by saying ‘I curse you’. These curses are small and inconsequential, like stepping in a wet patch in your socks. He asks what curse she put on him and she tells him that she took the chicken out of his dinner. He asks what dinner and she says spaghetti.
In the end Asher and Whitney end up giving this family the house officially, taking caring of any tax issues for them as well.
Dougie and Asher go way back. We see Dougie apologize to Asher for bullying him as teenagers, and Asher says he thought they were just joking. This could be because Asher is just a doormat, or because he’s in denial that his friends were making fun of him. Dougie is the alcoholic showrunner of Asher’s show who killed his ex-girlfriend while drunk driving, but is in denial that his recklessness was the cause of her death. When Asher mentions the little girl’s curse, Dougie decides that the reason his ex died was also because of a curse.
One day, when Dougie is tormenting Asher, Asher snaps and says something about his ex-girlfriend’s death. Angry and traumatized, Dougie whispers ‘I curse you’ when Asher walks away.
Whitney and Cara
Out of the two of them, Whitney wants to be a part of this community the most, at least performatively. There isn’t a clear line between virtue and performance for Whitney, so performative virtue is the best she can do. The grating awkwardness and cringe of Whitney as a character is that everyone she’s displacing is aware of the fact that she’s a gentrifier, whereas Whitney is oblivious to this and tries to be friends with everyone.
Cara is an indigenous artist that Whitney tries to have a bussiness relationship with. Whitney goes to her art exhibit where Cara has a performance where she silently gives people ham, and at the end she screams. When Cara hands Whitney the ham, Whitney eats it. We see another person get handed the ham, this time an Indigenous man that Whitney invited to the art exhibit whilst trying way too hard to be friendly, and he doesn’t eat it.
Later in the show, Cara tells Whitney that she doesn’t consent to her art being in the show, and in an evil stroke of genius, Whitney tells Cara that she’s pregnant with Asher’s baby, starts tearing up while over-sharing about their relationship and then offers Cara a very well paying job working on the show. This backs Cara into a corner.
Later on again, Whitney asks Cara what the ham represents, and in an improvised speech, Cara says that it represents how it feels to be indigenous. People take pieces of her and eat it. Whitney seems shaken by this but doesn’t change the way she lives.
Whitney’s relationship with the indigenous people in Espanola continues to be performative and ridiculous, and Cara’s friend makes fun of her for it.
Whitney and Asher’s relationship
As I’ve previously established, Asher is a cuck. He’s very meek and any time he isn’t it’s to defend his wife. As the show goes on, we see Whitney grow more and more weary of Asher, complaining about him more and more. In the second to last episode Whitney loses her cool and tries to upset Asher by showing him an edit of ‘Fliplanthropy’ where she rolls her eyes at im and talks about how uncool he is. This leads to Asher going on a big speech about how nothing can make him want to leave and they make up. That’s the end of the episode.
Asher and Whitney’s business
Whitney inherited the real estate from her parents but wants to be considered separate from them because of their unethical business practices. There is, of course, no way to work with property without being unethical unless you’re allowing people to squat for free. As for the reality TV show, we see Dougie trying to convince Whitney to make the show more dramatized and more centered around her. She’s easily convinced because she’s a narcissist. She mentions wanting to change the name from Fliplanthropy to Green Queen, and Dougie praises this idea. In the end, the network doesn’t end up going with it.
Analysis
There’s a stereotype that if you do something bad on Indigenous land, you’ll be cursed. It’s interesting that the person who actually ended up cursing someone is one of the neo-colonizers.
Some possible themes for this show are guilt and how you can’t sympathize your way out of systemic issues. Whitney is trying really hard to do her version of the right thing, but if you grew up with parent’s like hers, unless you’re a literal class, and in Whitney’s case, race traitor, you’re not going to have much luck.
I love movies and shows that address the awkwardness of privilege interacting with marginalization. A movie that almost did this was Saltburn. The Writer’s Block made a video on Saltburn discussing how the last seven minutes ruin the movie, and I completely agree. I loved the awkwardness of the ‘real boy’ interacting with the mega-wealthy people. Anyone who grew up not that well off knows that feeling very well.
I find the feeling of someone not fitting in (in regards to class) very compelling. The feeling of someone who’s not “in that world” missing the etiquette and expectations and social cues.
Felix’s family aren’t going to hurt Oliver. The way they talk to him is awful and condescending but if Oliver is willing to change himself for people like Felix, it should be no challenge to be around his family. He did it to himself.
I’ve met well off, nice car, roof-fell-in-so-we-re-did-the-entire-house types of people (not a joke), and they’ve been lovely. I know people my age who are, as Chris Flemming calls it, indoor beach children harvested at the back of a Sephora after a few too many chemical spills. Teenagers and young adults who actually look shiny. You can tell looking at them that their clothes are expensive and their iPhone is the newest release and always has been. These kids get their rooms refurbished whenever they want and their pet cat has a tiny throne at every window.
While I am partially joking, coming from a lower class background, any time I’m in someone’s house and it’s obviously expensive, I feel as though I shouldn’t be there. I like that Saltburn captures some of that discomfort. The Curse might capture it too well because the cringe is too much to watch for most of the show. Saltburn takes this issue and turns it into a more easily digestible, made for TikTok, bisexual coded indie movie. This makes it easier to watch and understand, but also strips it of its real depth.
